Skip to main content

"He Said 'Bro,' Red Flag"

 


All these 'school shooting' stories are starting to look the same. Except perhaps for this one. Because with this one we get a controversy over the use of the word "bro."

There was an active shooter in the halls of Oxford High. One particular classroom followed the protocol they had learned on 'shooter drills.' They sheltered in place -- locking the door, taping the windows. So far as I can tell, there was no teacher in the room at the time. One of the students seems to have been 'in charge.'

Then came a knock on the door.

The voice that presumably belonged to the knocker said that he was from the sheriff's office and "it's safe to come out." 

 In-charge guy, "We're not willing to take that risk right now."

Voice from outside, "Come to the door and look at my badge, bro." 

I'm impressed that the students in that class had the operational common sense to understand that sheriff's deputies don't call you "bro." 

Not only did they not open the door for the shooter, they opened and exited through the classroom windows and ran like heck.  

Good going, bro and sis, everyone. 

The fact that the knocker was NOT the shooter does not qualify my impression that they were exhibiting operational good sense. He wasn't. 

Someone from the sheriff's office should talk like that is who he is. As this incident shows, people recognize that. All those in the classroom ended up safe after their 'run for it,' so no harm was done, but an unnecessary degree of angst was added to what was already a stressful situation for all of them. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more